SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP HANA - Combination and Comparison

Up to the recent decades, business analysts typically used some kind of data warehousing solution to prepare reports required for analytical and decision support-ing scenarios. These data warehouses are pretty effective for this purpose, as they store the data in optimized data structures, which are filled periodically with replicates from the transactional system. Because of this periodical nature, the data in this ware-house is not necessarily up-to-date. Nevertheless, nowadays the use of in-memory da-tabase platforms is growing rapidly, which might make sense of reporting on the transactional data directly, in some cases. These reports are real-time; thanks to that data warehouses receive an important rival, which might even question there reason for existence.

The scope of the thesis is to walk around this topic, to introduce the different answers given by a data warehouse and an in-memory database for the same prob-lems and to find out, whether data warehouses could actually be substituted by simple in-memory database platforms. Additionally, the study brings specific use-cases from the area of PLM (Product Life-cycle Management), and the answers are given by the two relevant products of SAP: SAP Business Warehouse, the SAP HANA in-memory da-tabase platform and their combinations. The paper is in English.